Quietude | Cambodia

I've traveled in America, Europe, the Far East, and Southeast Asia. Nowhere have I met people more adept at doing nothing than the Cambodians.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that a Cambodian can spend three or four hours straight sitting in a chair (alone or together with others) just staring off into the distance without any respite of magazine, book, TV, or even conversation. They "chill out" for excruciating stretches of time without seeming to grow restless.

In the West (where we have "no loitering" laws and where people are raised on the Protestant work ethic), this hyper-lounging seems suspicious, maybe criminal, and certainly wasteful. But in a culture where mindful meditation is a crucial spiritual foundation, some of this daily trance behavior makes sense.

Khmer people have many hours each day to be reflective, to be contemplative. I think it's harder to find this time in America because wealth gives us more material distractions, the procuring of that wealth eats up most of our time, and finally TV takes the rest (the average American watches four hours a day).

I'm not naīve. Much of this Cambodian meditation is the result of having nothing better to do, but for now I'm more interested in the effect of this mindful quietude than its cause. After living in Southeast Asia for a few months, I began to see that the culture itself had more sari than my own culture.

Khmer people in particular, but also Thais and Laotians, seemed more present in the here and now than Westerners. Always on guard against my own temptation to romanticize these exotic peoples, I tried hard to universalize their sense of ease, but I struggled to find an American correlate to their modest tranquillity.

Of course, not everyone who's slacking in Asia is doing so because of Buddhism. But the monkey-mind ambition of Western individualism, always seeking to maximize pleasures and increase profits, is less powerful here because from the time you're a baby you always see yourself as part of a clan or a collective family or village. Your selfish drives are probably being trained, sacrificed, and subjugated more regularly.

And the irony is that these people who have less affluence, less choice, and less individual freedom actually seem to have more happiness.